


what was left behind

by ekourege



Category: Ao no Exorcist | Blue Exorcist
Genre: (because he's NOT coping), AU, AU where the seal doesn't start coming loose until a little later, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bittersweet, Character Study, Cooking, Fujimoto Shiro Still Dies, Gen, Grief, Idk he's coping, Loss, Rin pursues cooking professionally, Yukio is a Bad Brother, as a way of coping with grief and feeling disconnected from others, he's trying, prose, would you imagine that? Okumura Rin coping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:53:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26709313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ekourege/pseuds/ekourege
Summary: Cooking was a labor of love.Okumura Rin knew this all too well.
Relationships: Fujimoto Shirou & Okumura Rin, Okumura Rin & Okumura Yukio
Comments: 8
Kudos: 153
Collections: nice fics





	what was left behind

**Author's Note:**

> Ahahaha... apologies to anyone who reads Asters.... have this warm-up as consolation? 
> 
> Anyway, I think Rin should cope. (Until the inevitable happens and he can't cope anymore) 
> 
> Enjoy!

Grease sizzles in a pan, bubbling and crackling over controlled flame, heat skimming over skilled forearms as they artfully push and flip the pan’s contents; a strong mixture of aromas wafting throughout the kitchen and trailing into the hallway. A ghost of scent. A simple recipe made under a skilled hand and the splayed palms of those ready to accept it. Herbs and spices, pleasant smells, and deep flavors.

Sweet, salty; sour, bitter.

Rin was in love. This he was sure, the only thing he’s ever been truly certain of. (At least, he thinks so? He’s been told he’s pretty thick-headed, so he could be wrong.)

Cooking was… special. Rewarding, in ways he’d never expected it could be.

At first, it was a way of showing appreciation. The gratitude he couldn’t express in words.

He’d seen the residents of the monastery, seen his dad, make an omelet plenty of times. Over and over, watched the monks cook him and Yukio breakfast while they sat at the dining table impatiently. 

They’d made him food, so he wanted to do the same. To do something nice and make it taste good—because food _was_ supposed to taste good. Intentions were only half of the equation.

He tried, and like most things, failed. 

Except, that time, something about cooking caught on his brain, jabbed at him. Whereas he would have given up immediately, were it something else, this time was different. When he presented the soggy, shell-ridden omelets to everyone… he wanted to try again. 

(It didn’t help that they’d teased him mercilessly for it, which only served to stoke his determination.)

So he did. He tried again.

...and again. 

Over and over, trying, failing, succeeding with mediocre results, Rin got better and better. At first, it was omelets. The food he’d first tried to make. With time and help he begrudgingly accepted, he slowly branched out. Bacon, perfect rice. Breakfast foods, lunch foods, hearty dinners. It was a minor fixation, something that slotted neatly into his life. A passion that burned at low heat, a slow roil where he could enjoy the process and serve the results.

With his dad, with Yukio. With everyone at the monastery. (He’d have liked to share it with people outside of the monastery, but he didn’t exactly have a good reputation.)

It wasn’t like Yukio’s passion to be a doctor, which had his little brother toiling away in his room for hours on end; or his father’s devotion to the church and the people in it which had the man gone at all hours or in the oratory, hands clasped in silent prayer. No, it was a quiet joy, small and easily left for days on end. To be picked up and set down at a whim.

A calm, practiced ease, a fierce joy, the intensity of a new recipe. It brought a calm thrill, where the stakes were (relatively) low.

Okumura Rin grew better at cooking, but worse in everything else.

What had started as seething frustration, an ignorance of his nature, became a deep set alienation. School, studying, interacting with others, talking… none of those things were his strengths. In fact, most would say they were his most lacking qualities. It was easier to speak through physicality, through punching people he found repulsive and showing love by guiding a recipe to completion.

He gradually started to tackle more difficult, more time-intensive recipes. He barely passed mandatory schooling before deciding not to go to high school. There was no use for it. Rin already knew how it would play out.

Yukio had started taking the lunches Rin packed with him to school. Rin’s fighting habit got worse. He was struggling to find a job now that he was done with school.

Aimlessly improving the art of making food, aimlessly drifting through life. Unliked, weathered by time and scorn.

Cooking was a labor of love, he’d come to find out. 

Sharing it was its greatest draw, its greatest joy. He hadn’t always understood that.

Sure, it was satisfying to eat something you made yourself, especially if it tasted good. There was no point in cooking if the food wasn’t going to somebody, right?

What drew him back, though, time and time again, through every failure, every scolding he got after making a mess… it was the look on everyone’s faces when they took the first bite of whatever he’d whipped up that day.

He was thick-headed, yes, but there was a sort of desperation to the way he would watch their expressions. He didn’t understand others, why he could never do things right yet everyone else did so with ease. The twitching of eyebrows, subtle muscles pulling in their faces. Watching, waiting, straining to see them all light up in approval. It was a bad habit of his, memorizing the faces of his family when he served them something they liked—

—When Rin did something they approved of.

And so… when someone had a bad day, it was just a coincidence when Rin made their favorite or served them an extra helping. When Yukio was struggling under the stress of trying to become a doctor, it was just a coincidence, surely, that Rin had made himself a perfect study snack and had enough to share.

It wasn’t serious. 

It was just food. Just a hobby.

Hey, he could be good at things too, you know! Just because he was terrible with books and school, and he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, and people called him rude things… it didn’t mean anything.

_(Cooking was a labor of love.)_

And then, the day Rin snagged his first regular job, his dad died.

He remembers hearing the news with extreme clarity, remembers the funeral with just as much detail.

He had a bad habit, memorizing how people looked when they were pleased, or happy, or even just content. He really, really should just forget it all and focus on something else—like making a living.

Rin remembers how Yukio stopped looking him in the eyes the day after. Then, within weeks, Yukio wasn’t in the monastery at all, off to a prestigious school to become a doctor.

He was proud of him! He was. It was a big deal since it’d been his dream since he was a little kid!

Then there were two empty plates at the table. Lain perfectly arranged in front of the seats where two missing members of his family would have sat.

The rift that had existed between him and everyone else grew wider, and then wider still, until it felt like an ocean’s width. A plate of food wouldn’t be enough to bridge that gap, wouldn’t be loud enough to carry across all that ocean.

Unmoored, disconnected from everyone else, cooking lost its shine.

* * *

He wasn’t sure if anything would come of it, at first. Cooking was just a hobby.

Yeah, he was pretty good, and his family always enjoyed his food, but it wasn’t anything special. He wasn’t a cooking genius. He wasn’t very good at creating new dishes, even though he struggled to play by the rules of a cookbook. 

All-in-all there wasn’t really any drive for him to pursue some sort of food-related career. Just cooking for his family was enough. If they liked it, it was enough.

Except, they were gone. Empty plates, awkward silences, needling questions, and accidental jabs.

Empty chairs. A full grave. 

Cooking just wasn’t the same when you didn’t have someone to cook for.

So, even though it was embarrassing, even though Rin had trouble interacting with others, was too hot-headed to cooperate in a work environment, (especially when they insulted him to his face) he signed up for cooking classes. 

He couldn’t afford a cooking school with his pay, and he knew he didn’t do well in a schooling environment, but… it was fun. It was mostly composed of older people looking to improve their home cooking skills, but they had tips and tricks and new recipes he’d never even heard of before.

They weren’t sure what to make of him, most of the time (he heard their whispers, quiet but not quiet enough), but most people were like that.

He shared his dishes, had dishes shared with him.

Slowly, surely, even though things were still so damn awkward—

Rin gathered the courage to apply to some of the local restaurants. Real restaurants, not at the fast-food joints that peppered their town. 

Most never called back—his credentials were sorely lacking, after all. He was a nobody. Some called back just to reject him, in that polite, pleasant way that stung more than a venomous insult.

Contact with Yukio was sparse. He kept applying, branching out further. He’d get a bike if he had to, walk as far as it took if needed. Hell, by that point he’d hop a train to another city just for the chance to work in a kitchen. 

A real kitchen. 

The seasons changed, and Rin only narrowly avoided getting fired from the convenience store. No one called.

Until someone did. 

He remembers it clearly, how bored he’d been in the monastery, glued to their old rotary phone (that old fart had hated technology, said something about it never working right), staring at the chipped paint of the wall beside it. Really, since his dad died the place seemed to be coming apart.

And then it rang, piercing in the quiet apathy of the kitchen. He could hear the monks in other parts of the house, but not once had they entered the kitchen the entire day.

Rin remembers leaping for the phone, chair scraping against the linoleum floor as it was flung back, remembers clumsily picking up and very, very nervously answering.

A call back, asking him to come in for an interview.

It was a tiny place, a little hole in the wall joint run by a middle-aged couple. They needed help cooking, as the two of them were already split between cleaning, manning the register, cooking, and taking orders.

Rin, of course, was happy to be of help.

A nerve-wracking interview, which, weirdly enough, was mostly small talk, and Rin was hired. Just like that.

A cook. In a kitchen... Making food to share with others.

He quit his job at the convenience store that evening, celebrated with the other monks at dinner, who looked almost as elated as he was. Congratulations were dolled out, his hair was ruffled, and for once, the table was near full.

Two chairs sat empty, but it was alright. It would half to be. He texted Yukio about it. It took him two days to respond. His dad’s grave couldn’t speak back to him, but the headstone felt warmer than usual.

Humming as he sets an onion on the cutting board, Rin looks to the side, reaching for his knife so he can cut it while securing the vegetable with his other hand. 

He sees a little speck of black on the back of his hand and stares at it, almost perplexed. Small, dusty, and oddly lumpy, it almost looked like...Charcoal? 

Weird.

Rin flicks the speck from his hand and continues working, unbothered. He resumes humming a grating, stilted tune. He was shit at singing.

This order, he knew, was going to be spicy.

**Author's Note:**

> is it obvious yet that I don't know shit about cooking
> 
> Anyway, find me on tumblr at [ekourege](https://ekourege.tumblr.com/). I blog about writing there.


End file.
